Peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming has been gaining a great deal of attention due to its ability to distribute content in a relatively inexpensive manner as compared to traditional client-server solutions. In the art, live streaming has been effectuated by a streaming server uploading to peers or clients requesting a live content stream. Such a unicast content distribution structure can however not scale to a large number of clients, as bandwidth and processing requirements on the streaming server will be severe. An alternative is to use Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) instead of a single streaming source but this solution is also relatively costly as the number of clients becomes large. In order to address the operating cost of the CDNs for a large number of clients, P2P live streaming systems were proposed to significantly reduce the bandwidth requirement of the P2P streaming source(s) or distribution server(s) in a CDN. P2P live streaming systems are based on the concept of utilizing upload bandwidth of peers in order to save some of the bandwidth required from the streaming source, by allowing peers to stream to each other. However, use of P2P upload might not be applicable to all devices as the uploading of content from one uploading peer to several other peers could affect the uploading peer negatively in terms of processing power and battery life. This is exemplified by resource constrained devices such as smart phones and tablets. An obvious workaround to this problem is to simply prevent such resource constrained devices from uploading data and instead rely on non-constrained peers for uploading content. This solution could be considered provided that there are a sufficient number of peers that can act as uploaders for the resource constrained peers. If there are an insufficient number of such non-constrained peers, the resource constrained peers would have to download from a P2P streaming server or a CDN.
The situation is made significantly more complex when a mix of different types of peers exists inside a private network. Such private networks are common in corporate and enterprise settings. A private network can be divided into any number of network segments representing for example different geographic premises, offices and/or departments. In such setting, there is a desire to minimize the amount of data traffic flowing in or out of any particular network segment. Having a significant number of resource constrained peers in such network segment is bound to increase the traffic in and out of the segment with existing P2P approaches.